A child’s first five years, before she enters kindergarten, lay the foundation for the development of all academic skills that are taught in school. Children need interaction with “real” people with whom they have an emotional bond in order to develop the necessary prerequisite skills for school. Language-rich environments allow children to develop the self confidence and underlying speech, language and pre-literacy skills to succeed in reading, writing, math, science, social studies and all other academic pursuits.

Emergent literacy is made up of several key components:

-Speech, Language and Cognitive Skills: Researchers have consistently found that children who have larger vocabularies, more complexity in their spoken language, and greater understanding of language and concepts at a young age do better on measures of reading in later life. From infancy on, it is so very important to talk, talk, talk and listen, listen, listen to children!

-Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Children need to develop the awareness that speech is composed of units such as words, syllables, and sounds. Developing this knowledge is a key component for reading success. While learning to speak is an innate process that occurs automatically over time as children are exposed to their native languages, learning to read is NOT a natural process. It must be taught, and at the entry to kindergarten, some children are more ready than others to learn this process. Three and four year old children can develop rhyme sensitivity that allows them to be more attuned to the similarities and differences of sounds within words. As children become more aware of letter names, shapes and sounds, they develop the capacity to use auditory synthesis skills to know what a word is when they hear the sequence of sounds (e.g., /c/ /a/ /t/ = cat), and to use auditory sequencing skills to analyze words into the correct sequence of sounds in the words (cat = /c/ /a/ /t/).

-Alphabetic Principle: Knowledge of letters of the alphabet and their corresponding sounds. Knowledge of the letters of the alphabet at school entry is one of the best predictors of eventual reading achievement.
 
-Print Awareness:Knowledge that print carries the meaning of the story, printed words correspond to spoken words, print moves from left to right and from top to bottom on the page. Facilitation of this knowledge should be an important component of early childhood education. 

-Writing Development: Before beginning formal writing, children experiment with scribbling, producing letter-like forms, and using invented spelling to try to write words.